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It is a meeting with oneself. It is going beyond what you’d want to know.

This was how one senior manager described the transparent organization to the Swedish organisational anthropologist Christina Garsten.
She told this story as part of her opening keynote presentation at the recent EPIC conference where she talked about her fieldwork studying how the new trend of transparency affects processes in organisations today.

Within the last years, transparency has become a goal in itself in the corporate setting, with words such as

all being signs of how companies are playing with visibility to showcase their values and work. Garsten argues that companies use claiming transparency often simply as a way to avoid criticism preemptively. If you tell more than people expect, as the senior manager describes in the quote above, that transparency can help your organisation in two ways:

It can be an invitation to trust – both internally and externally. It can help to build a conscientious culture within your organisation, but also give external stakeholders more reasons to trust you, since they can see and hear how you usually work.

It can direct attention. By making visible a lot of information about your organisation, external stakeholders will come to depend on you to act as a guide to that information, and allow you to display (or hide) stories about your organisation.

But as most organizations are painfully aware, transparency is much more tricky than just opening up all of your processes. It is a constant balance between what to reveal and what to veil. Where does transparency end? It all depends on position, context and degree of transparency involved: It makes a huge difference what you reveal, when you reveal and who you reveal it to. And finding that balance is very difficult.

Following the keynote, I’ve been thinking further about these issues, which also are at the core of what Socialsquare works with. It is difficult enough for just one person to find the balance between transparency and opacity in what he or she publishes online, as it reflects directly back on the ethos of that person: Who that person is.

But finding the same balance in a group of people becomes nigh-on impossible, as people are different, and interpret things in different ways. Just between the six of us here at Socialsquare we often argue about what to publish and what not to publish (though, oftentimes the conclusion is that we just ought to blog a lot more about the work we do…).

Traditionally, organisations have managed this balance by setting up strict rules for communication, or even a central point of reference where all external communication needs to be approved. But this typically results in the completely soul-less statements you tend to find in press releases and corporate presentations.

Perhaps, for a group, transparency is best provided by others than yourself. Rather than expecting organisations to be transparent from inside-out, it would be better to make them transparent outside-in: By letting organisations build trust based on what others, including people that you already know and trust, say about them.

A good example of this sort of social trust mechanism is eBay’s Feedback system. It would be interesting challenge to build a system that allowed stakeholders to give feedback on any given organisation in the same way that eBay allows for their sellers. Companies already put out extensive lists of references and workers already put out extensive lists of employers. But the question is: would they be interested in revealing their failures and mistakes as well?